Duncan Wierman’s Blog

Real estate marketing is like any other kind of marketing or list building: you’re trying to reach a niche market and must plan accordingly. You have to start by identifying your target market in order to develop your message convey exactly the kind of high value business proposition which your niche will respond to.

The first steps are to:

1) Identify your target market; start with geo targeting and work with the demographics from there

2)Decide how you want to be perceived by this target market and decide how you’ll foster this perception

3) Identify and refine your value proposition

Once you’ve done this, the next step is to develop and distribute your value proposition, making sure that your value proposition is perceived by your target market exactly as intended – in marketing, shaping consumer perception isn’t just the most important thing: it’s everything.

You have to start by positioning yourself to be perceived in a specific way; from here, you’ll need to maintain, develop, grow or alter this market position as you deem necessary.

The real challenge is putting these principles into action:

Driving Traffic

There are some important principles of traffic generation you need to understand in order to be successful at bringing visitors into your website.

There are both principles and rules of traffic generation; principles have to do with your approach to the task and the rules are the practical nuts and bolts of driving traffic. You need to have an understanding of the larger picture before you can successfully put the practical techniques into action. What you’ll usually see a lot of is the techniques alone. While this is still valuable information, you probably won’t get far with these techniques if you aren’t versed in the underlying principles of traffic generation.

These are the most important principles of traffic generation:

* Traffic generation isn’t a black art – it’s something which largely relies on common sense and methods which can be replicated with consistent results.

* The reason people usually fail in their traffic generation efforts is that they don’t truly commit to making traffic generation techniques a fully integrated part of their business strategy.

* You need to create a plan for driving traffic. Think of it as a road map; follow it, but remember that it’s not carved in stone. Your plan can and should evolve to reflect your real life experience and results.

* Continually test and track the results of your traffic generation efforts – and adjust your plan accordingly.

* Set goals for yourself and as you meet them, raise the bar; traffic generation is a process, not a single objective.

* Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see results immediately.

* Remember that driving traffic begins with building your site – Why is this? Because your site should be built from the ground up with visitors in mind. Look at other sites in your industry to gain an understanding of patterns of visitor behavior. See what these other sites are doing; don’t hesitate to take a page from your competition’s playbook if you see something which is working for them.

* Remember that traffic is like energy: it cannot be created or destroyed – just redirected. Your target market is already out there. All you need to do is to build market share by bringing these consumers to your site.

If redirecting traffic is your goal, then you need to figure out where the traffic is now before you can redirect it to your own site. This means you not only have to find these potential visitors, but you have to find a way to get your message across to them.

This is where things can become challenging; it’s something like standing in Grand Central Station at rush hour with a megaphone, trying to be heard above the noise of the crowd. The goal here is to get the attention of your target market and get them to act – namely, to come from where they are now to where you want them to be: your site.

Once a visitor makes it to your site, it’s up to you to get them to make a purchase, sign up for your list or take any other kind of action you’d like them to take. Even if all you want is for visitors to read your content, the principles are equally applicable.

Note that when we talk about traffic here, we’re talking about targeted traffic; random traffic is basically the noise to targeted traffic’s signal – what we want here is a high signal to noise ratio, if you follow my analogy.

* At its core, all business is arbitrage. You’re taking something which is cheap (to you, at least) and exchanging it for something of higher value – buy low, sell high.

For example, SEO and other free traffic generation strategies essentially trade your time for traffic which is of higher value to you; this value may be measured directly in monetary terms or in other means (for instance, as signups to a list). The same is true of paid methods of driving traffic like PPC advertising; you’re paying what you deem to be a small amount for something else which you see as more valuable.

If you’ve been reading carefully so far, you may have noticed that I haven’t said a word about being indexed by the search engines; that’s because this falls under the heading of techniques, not the principles of traffic generation. While you do of course want to be indexed, this isn’t your primary objective – and it’s something which will happen naturally as you work to drive traffic using other strategies.

Don’t lose sleep over the search engine crawlers; they will come sooner or later. Remember that even once your site is indexed, it’s no guarantee that visitors will follow. Focusing on being indexed is losing sight of the forest for the trees. This will happen anyway as a side effect of using other traffic generation methods. What you should be focused on is getting targeted traffic to your site. For instance, if you exchange links with another site (or even a directory) relevant to your industry, the search engine crawlers will follow these links when indexing this other site and voila! Your site will be indexed.

What you need to do is to let the web know that your site is there while simultaneously driving targeted traffic. The best way to do so is to create links to your site from other sites; not only do these result in your site being indexed, but back links are great SEO and of course, they can generate traffic directly through visitor clicks.

Here are a few things you can do to start driving traffic almost immediately:

* Whenever you add new content to your site or blog, submit this content to the social bookmarking sites (Digg, Technorati, etc.). Make an effort to give your posts attention-getting titles so that people will be interested in reading your content.

* Post comments on blogs which have a similar audience to the one you’re trying to reach. Don’t post comment spam; write real, thoughtful comments and include a link back to your own site.

* Start contributing to forums and message boards relevant to your industry.

* Create an RSS feed for your site or blog and submit this feed to directories.

* Write articles on your niche topic and submit them to directories like ezinearticles.com and article dashboard.com; this will also bring you sustained traffic over the long term.

* Join link exchanges

* Build a linkwheel; create blogs and pages on platforms like HubPages, Squidoo, Facebook, etc. and link them to each other in a web ring-style structure (you can find plenty of information on how to do this online). This helps the search engines identify the topic of your site and will improve your page rank as well.

These techniques can start driving traffic to your site very quickly; if you implement all of these methods and follow the basic principles of traffic generation, you really can’t fail at bringing in targeted traffic.

So why do so many people fail at traffic generation? Because they don’t stick with it and follow through; far too many website owners give up after a few days or a few weeks, saying that it’s just too much work for too little result – instead of analyzing their efforts and figuring out what is and isn’t working for them.

Make Sure You’re Tracking Your Traffic!

Before you do any of the above, get a tracker for your site. StatCounter.com is a free traffic tracker that you can easily plug into your blogger or WordPress blog (they give you step-by-step instructions to do so). There are also plenty of free trackers available for static sites – Google Analytics is an incredible free tool which you should consider using; you can use it for blogs as well.

Tracking your traffic is absolutely essential; it’s no good to put effort into traffic generation if you can’t identify:

* Where your traffic is coming from

* What keywords are working to bring in visitors

* Which of your traffic generation efforts are performing the best

* How long visitors stay on your site and what they do while they’re there

None of this costs you a thing except for a little of your time.

So how about SEO? Here’s what you really need to know about search engine optimization:

1) Focusing on search engines rather than your potential customers is always a losing bet. If you’re putting all of your energy towards keeping up with the search engines and their constantly evolving algorithms, you’re losing sight of your visitors.

2) Optimizing your site for very competitive (i.e. popular) keywords means fighting an uphill battle with no guarantee of success.

3) Generally speaking, you’ll do best with long tail keywords; these require far less work in terms of optimizing your content. Long tail keywords are also very effective at attracting targeted traffic. The effort you put into optimizing your content for long tail keywords will bring you much better results than the same amount of time and effort spent optimizing your site for popular keywords.

4) Offsite optimization is just as important (if not more so) than on site SEO. Back links can do wonders for your traffic; but remember to keep all of your efforts focused on visitors, not search engines whether you’re working on on-site or offsite SEO.

5) Base your traffic generation strategy on visitors and the search engines will follow.

6) As you develop and implement SEO techniques, always keep in mind how people actually look for information online – that’s why long tail keywords are so important. It’s a lot easier to rank high in the search results for long tail keywords. Being in the top 10 on Google for several long tail keywords will bring you a lot more traffic than being on the 10th page of results for a highly competitive keyword (which is where you’ll start out if you’re very lucky if you choose to go this route).

7) Effective SEO is a bottom-up process, not a top-down process. Start off by using several long tail keywords (as many as you like) and working to rank highly for these keywords. As you begin to rank high for these keywords, you can add shorter, more popular keywords and start getting traffic (and increasing your page rank) for these keywords thanks to the popularity you’ve built with long tail keywords.

8) Remember that it’s a long way to the top; be patient and enjoy the view on your way up. Stick with it and you’ll eventually have more traffic than you know what to do with – and that’s the kind of problem that every webmaster and especially every online business owner can live with.

The cycle has come back around again; there is a resurgence of interest in real estate investment roughly every 10-15 years and the craze is once again underway. Along with rising public interest in the investment opportunities available in real estate, there are the inevitable frauds, hucksters and other assorted parasites who come out of the woodwork to make money at the expense of gullible consumers.

Am I being fair to the latest generation of self styled real estate gurus? I’ll let you make the call. However, it’s apparent to anyone who has any real world experience in real estate investment that these so called experts are often anything when it comes to real estate, though many are undeniably skilled marketers. Would you prefer to make a real estate deal with an actual real estate broker/guru/mentor who knows the industry or a marketer just moving in on real estate in the hopes of making some money off of new investors? Again, I’ll let you decide.

The first thing that any investor needs to look at is the way that these real estate gurus get their message across. What you’ll see a lot of from these real estate investment “experts” is flashy websites, ( tho some have not even bothered to or run spell check before sending out emails or uploading site content) and above all, a lot of hype.

You’ve seen these marketing emails and websites before; they probably look more than a little familiar and it’s for good reason. Replace the words “real estate” with “Google money making machine” or “make millions working from home” or any other online marketing scam that’s going around at the moment and you’ll notice that their content is basically identical. Right down to the stock photos of people standing by yachts, limousines or palatial homes, these sites are like those run by scammers of any stripe, which should raise a red flag immediately. If you’re being offered something which seems too good to be true, it most certainly is.

OK. I haven’t been entirely fair to these self appointed real estate investment geniuses. While the vast majority of them haven’t made any money in real estate (or possibly in much of anything else), there are some who do have some useful information on the market to share – for a price of course. The problem here is that even those flashy real estate marketers who do know a little something about property investment aren’t offering anything which isn’t already available for free or for a much lower price then they’re asking.

What these new real estate gurus are really out to do is separate gullible would be investors from their hard earned savings. Let’s be honest here. They’re not interested in making you rich or even interested in you as a person; though they are keenly interested in your wallet. While I wouldn’t tell anyone not to make a living and as a long time real estate broker myself, I can attest to the fact that there is plenty of money to be made in real estate, these “gurus” are motivated by greed and greed alone.

What can you expect if you decide to pay these experts for their books, seminars or real estate marketing systems? Not much, as it happens. You definitely shouldn’t expect any kind of customer support, you shouldn’t expect any information which isn’t available elsewhere for free, you shouldn’t expect your results to be anything like what you’re promised and above all, you definitely can’t expect to get your money back, no matter what.

What you can expect is to lose out on whatever you pay these people, to get information which is often worthless and quite often, to end up on a large number of mailing lists which will keep your inbox stocked with enough spam to put Hormel to shame. There are people out there who will try to sell you what they claim is exclusive real estate investment secrets that will make you wealthy instantly (and again, let me tell you that there is no such thing, no matter what they may tell you); but they really make their money by selling their mailing lists to their fellow scammers and fly by night internet marketers.

If you’re looking for sound advice on real estate investment, I’d advice looking elsewhere. There are plenty of quality sources of information on the property investment market – but that’s not what these people are offering you. You can learn much more by visiting your local library (for free, I might add) or better still, by talking to an actual real estate professional; and one thing you’ll notice is that reputable brokers never use these bling-laden websites and shoddy, multilevel marketing-style sales letters. Real estate investment – REAL property investment just doesn’t work that way. It’s not a get rich quick scheme, but no business worth getting into is.

Think before you pay any of these gurus for anything or even give them your contact information. Genuinely useful information is out there and you don’t need to pay thousands for on a dubious webinar or seminar to get your hands on it. It seems obvious enough, but let me just leave you with two words about the latest batch of real estate gurus: caveat emptor.

Where do you want to be? On the first page of Google results of course; it’s where everyone with a website wants to be, especially if their website is part of their business. There are a lot of search engine optimization firms out there, with new ones popping up out of the woodwork daily in order to meet the growing demand for SEO services.

Naturally, real estate investment is like every other economic sector in that investors and brokers are taking to the web in the attempt to increase their visibility and to gain a larger share of the market. If you’re in the real estate business yourself, you almost certainly have a website by now – and you probably receive a lot of come-ons by SEO companies who are trying to convince you that they’ll be able to get your website into the coveted top spot in Google’s search results.

Before you pull out your wallet in response to their pitches, think for a minute. There are so many of these firms out there and a lot of them make these kinds of promises. Obviously, they can’t all be right and the vast majority of them can’t deliver any kind of results, let alone what they claim.

Before we go any further, I’d like to offer this little nugget of advice: don’t do business with anyone who promises you a spot on the first page of Google’s search results, especially if they tell you that they can get your website into the #1 spot.

Why? Because no one can guarantee this with 100% certainty; search engine optimization is not an exact science, since the algorithms used by Google and other search engines are closely guarded trade secrets and are constantly evolving. What this means is that what worked to improve a website’s page ranking six months ago won’t necessarily work today. This is why no reputable SEO firm will make these kinds of promises; but of course, there are a lot of SEO firms and consultants out there who are anything but reputable businesses.

But what about the proof these SEO “experts” offer you to demonstrate that they can really get your site into the top spot on Google? Let’s look at the kind of keywords they tell you can get you onto the first page of Google results.

The search terms which these SEO consultants and companies tell you they can get you top rankings for tend to be what are known as long tail keywords; these are essentially what they sound like. For example, something like “stop foreclosure fort myers” – and yes, there is a real estate broker whose website ranks #1 for this keyword.

You might also see companies or consultants making promises about Google rankings for phrases like: “Chicago discount home” or “Sell my house in Dallas”. Number one rankings for keywords like these can be valuable, though more often than not the SEO firms who promise you top rankings for a certain phrase can do so for a very simple reason: there is no competition for these phrases.

Isn’t it a good thing to have little to no competition? You might well ask this; on the web, it isn’t always good to have no competition, since no competition for a keyword means that no one is searching for this phrase. It doesn’t matter if you’re #1 for a given search term if no one is ever going to use this keyword in a Google search, since no one is going to find you. It’s always a good idea to do some research on any search term that a SEO company or consultant tells you is going to secure you the top ranking – you can use free tools (Google has one in fact) to find out if anyone is actually looking for this phrase on the web. In any case, you should avoid SEO firms who make promises like this.

People don’t all search for the same thing using the same keywords; everyone brings their own approach to Google or any search engine. There are trends in online behavior that you can count on to some degree, but again, there are no guarantees when it comes to search engine optimization, at least if you’re being honest about how the web works.

So what really will work to give your real estate investment business a higher profile online? You should pay attention to SEO, absolutely; but you should work with SEO consultants who have a good reputation and an established track record of getting results for their clients. What you should hear from these companies is that they can help your page ranking improve over time, not that they can instantly get you on to the first page of results; it just doesn’t work that way in real life.

Search engine optimization is a process, not a product – it takes time for a website to work its way up the ranks and you will have to be patient, at least if you want real, lasting results. Beware of anyone who tries to tell you otherwise: and there are a lot of people who will do exactly that these days. There are multi-level marketing schemes (or scams, as I would term them) which are predicated on selling people a pre-made SEO business; generally the people who have fallen for this are the ones trying to sell you on a package of SEO services which they promise will get allow your business to instantly dominate your market. Don’t believe them – it’s just not as simple as all that.

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